1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for editing and saving files in a network computer system and, in preferred embodiments, for handling multi-authoring conflicts resulting from multiple users concurrently editing and saving to the same file on a network drive.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a network computer system, multiple client computers are linked to a server via a network. Users at client computers in the network can read and write to files stored on a network drive in the server, such as spreadsheet, database, and word processing files. Users may download a file from the network drive to their respective client computer and edit such file. Two users may concurrently download and edit the same file on the network drive at their separate client computers. A multi-authoring conflict may arise when one of the users saves the file to the network drive while other users are still editing the file. In such case, those users editing the file after another user has saved the file will be editing a file that is different from the file they initially downloaded from the network drive.
To address such multi-authoring conflicts, prior art programs may cause the client computers to lock the file on the current users so they cannot make any changes to the file on the network drive after another user has saved to the file on the network drive. Other programs address the problem by not permitting multiple users to work on the same file. In such systems, when a second user attempts to pull up a file from the network drive which is being edited by another user, the program may present a dialog box informing the second user that the program may be pulled up in read-only mode. In read-only mode, the second user must save the file under a different name. In yet other programs, the last user editing the file may save the edited file but only after overwriting any changes made to the version of the file on the network drive. These prior art programming techniques do not permit multiple users from simultaneously editing and saving to the same file even if the users are editing separate unrelated sections of the same file.